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I know what whoopsie is from the answers to What is the 'whoopsie' process and how can I remove it?

I do not want to stop error reporting, as I think that error reporting is the minimum a user should do to try to help Ubuntu. But since the upgrade to 13.10, whoopsie has grown up quite chatty. I have literally hundreds of messages like that in my logs: 

SYS: Nov  4 14:40:48 samsung-romano whoopsie[1156]: online
SYS: Nov  4 14:41:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 4 times
SYS: Nov  4 14:42:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 2 times
SYS: Nov  4 14:43:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 2 times
SYS: Nov  4 14:44:56  whoopsie[1156]: last message repeated 2 times

% zgrep whoopsie /var/log/syslog*gz   | wc -l
773

Is there a way to tell whoopsie to be less verbose?

(the funny output format is from SLogger, a homemade program to check system log files I wrote ages ago, but this is basically the content of /var/log/syslog file).

Community
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Rmano
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    Hi! You aren't the only one who wants to disable this behaviour … :-/ – Look at this Launchpad bug and subscribe to it. Maybe it will become fixed. Best regards! – sokai Nov 13 '13 at 10:42

1 Answers1

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Per sokai, there is no way to run whoopsie that prevents it from logging these "online" messages -- it's a bug. However, if you want to get them out of your logs, you can drop the following line into /etc/rsyslog.d/00-whoopsie.conf and the messages won't be logged anymore:

  # whoopsie generates a lot of messages of "online"
  # these are worthless and can be filtered
  if $programname == 'whoopsie' and $msg == ' online' then ~

This is pretty specific, too. If whoopsie logs something else other than " online", it will still make it to your logs.

hrunting
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  • Won't this omit the initial "online" message as well? That change of state might be useful to retain. – Burhan Ali Jan 30 '14 at 09:14
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    You're right that it will filter "online" messages that are displayed after the app has actually made a state change. Unfortunately, rsyslog doesn't seem to provide a way to keep track of per-app state. For a perfect solution (only log "online" when whoopsie's state was previously not "online"), the bug needs to be fixed. – hrunting Feb 09 '14 at 17:07